Reluctantly building a productized agency and hitting $1M/yr in two years

Corey Haines knew one thing: He did not ever want to build a marketing agency. Then, he built a marketing agency.

But he used his aversion to build it into a different — and more palatable — sort of agency. Two years later, Conversion Factory is bringing in $1M/yr. And he has built six software products to boot.

Here's Corey on how (and why) he did it. 👇

Starting with an agency

Since I was 19, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I intentionally started building up skills and experience.

I did marketing for a couple of startups. I also did a lot of consulting. And I built up a newsletter called Swipe Files, where I talked about a lot of different marketing strategies.

I didn't know what kind of business I wanted to start... I just knew two things.

1. I wanted to start something

2. I did not want to start a marketing agency

But then, I got laid off. There's nothing like losing your job and having just a couple of months of savings to get you motivated to figure something out. And since I couldn't code at the time and I was having a hard time finding a technical cofounder, I decided to finally embrace the idea of starting an agency. It just made sense because of my experience and the fact that I was always turning away work.

I started Conversion Factory in July of 2023 with two of my friends. We are a SaaS marketing and design agency that works completely asynchronously on a productized model.

Within two months, we were doing $36,000 in MRR — which was necessary because I only had two months of savings. And now, we're doing over $1M in annualized run rate. And because of this agency, I've now also been able to learn to code and build a couple of SaaS products that are going well.

Building a productized workflow

My two cofounders and I whipped up a landing page in a week, and then spun up all of our processes and documentation on the fly as we got clients.

There was a lot of "just-in-time" learning. Thankfully, since we were providing a service and not a product, we could go to market very quickly. We had our first client within two weeks of launching — they signed up and paid us money without even hopping on a call beforehand.

I spun up a simple client dashboard in Notion with a Kanban-style task board, invited the client to it, and then we had their first deliverable turned around back to them within an hour. The big emphasis we had on our service was not putting ourselves in a corner with hourly or project-based pricing. The only way I would do a marketing and design agency was if we had a productized pricing and service model.

I have worked with a ton of different agencies, consultants, and freelancers as a marketer in-house for startups, seeing all the different ways that the working relationship can break down with a traditional service model. I tried to design everything about Conversion Factory to be the antithesis of what I didn't like, and to be the perfect combination of features that I would want to have if I were still working in-house at a startup.

This included a strict asynchronous work style with no meetings, no emails, and no Slack with clients. The only exception being a couple of one-off workshop-style calls that we do for bigger projects. But otherwise, we designed our pricing to be essentially like a subscription to a product with a simple workflow to provide complete transparency around the progress and collaboration on projects for our clients.

An optimized productized stack

Here's the stack:

• Our website is on Webflow, and we build most of our client sites on Webflow or Framer.

• We use Stripe for billing and Mercury for all of our banking.

• We use Plane for our payroll and contractor management.

• Every client gets their own Notion dashboard, which we've meticulously designed and refined over time.

• Zapier is the glue between quite a few tools and automating processes within Notion.

• For our own internal comms, we use Slack.

• We'll usually accompany updates on projects with Loom videos and AI-generated summaries.

• We use SavvyCal for all of our sales call scheduling and Grain for call recording.

• Figma is our design tool of choice.

• We like to use a tool called Optibase whenever we can for A/B testing and experimentation on Webflow sites.

• We use Typefully for social media scheduling.

• We use Fathom Analytics for web analytics.

• And we're pretty heavy users of ChatGPT to speed up copywriting and editing.

Scale your team early

About a year in, both my cofounders were going on paternity leave within a week of each other. It was a super stressful time because we hadn't hired anyone yet.

Filling in for each other and making sure that the work got done while someone was trying to enjoy their time off was the kick in the butt — but it was the kick in the butt that we needed to start growing and scaling our team.

Organic and not-so-organic channels

Like I said, we hit $36k MRR in 2 months. There were three reasons we were able to have such a successful launch:

1. The pent-up demand from past consulting that I had done.

2. The audience that I had built up on X (20,000+ followers) and LinkedIn.

3. My newsletter, Swipe Files, which has about 30,000 subscribers — all SaaS marketers and founders.

Since then, we've put in a lot of time and money:

1. Going to meetups and conferences (I went to 13 in one year!).

2. Sponsoring newsletters and podcasts.

3. Doing outbound emails (yes, this can be done without being super spammy).

4. Investing in SEO. It takes time, but it's well worth it.

Service businesses are driven by relationships and expertise, so we try to make sure that we do anything that helps us build one or both of those.

Winning with a productized model

We charge on fixed plans on Stripe subscriptions. They're essentially retainers with a specific productized workflow that starts at $6,000 per month and goes up from there depending on the work rate and number of concurrent tasks our clients want us to work on. We also have add-on services that are additional subscriptions.

Clients pay us anywhere from $6,000 to $20,000 per month depending on what core plan and/or add-ons they have.

One of the biggest drivers of growth for us has been increasing the ACV of our clients. We've changed our pricing several times and gone through many different iterations and packages that we offer.

Another thing that's worked really well is offering a $1,000 audit, which allows us to deliver a quick win to a prospective client and outline all the work that we can do for them in the future, as well as get familiar with our working relationship and expertise.

Start with a productized agency

I have been making products since 2018 — everything from ebooks and courses to software and consulting. I was always looking for something that could provide a full-time living so that I could work on creative projects and other things that might have more upside but take a longer amount of time to bootstrap.

I always resisted the idea of starting an agency or service business. But now that I'm in it and have had success with it, it just seems so obvious as something that is, in and of itself, very fulfilling and rewarding. And it also allows you to open up as much time as you want to work on other products.

I think it's very underrated to go all in on a productized service or agency. Then you can take all the earnings from that business into whatever you want to build next.

I'd highly recommend reading Rob Walling's blog post on "The stair-step method of bootstrapping."

Then dive into other productized businesses. I studied a lot of them before launching Conversion Factory. I would listen to podcast interviews with the founders, peruse their websites, go through forums and Slack channels, and hear what people have to say about them. I even DM'd and talked with a few other agency owners in other industries.

What's next?

I want to use all the time and money generated by a Conversion Factory to reinvest into other businesses. We are considering selling website templates or even incubating our own software or physical products within the agency.

Beyond that, personally, I've also been able to invest more time and money into my own software projects like Truelist, SwipeWell, Scriptive, and Safehold — all of which are making money!

If you want help marketing your SaaS, check out Conversion Factory.

If you want to learn more about SaaS marketing, subscribe to my newsletter Swipe Files or buy my ebook SaaS Marketing Ideas.

More info about me and links to other projects on my personal site. I blog about things like how to not dress like a dork and how to make your own language.

And lastly, I've been an OG vibe coder since 2023 and also have more software projects like Commenze and Learn Copywriting.